


Your ship may be coming in

by jesshelga



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti)
Genre: Coffee, Facial Shaving, Fix-It, Friendship, Gen, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, M/M, the different ways people take care of one another
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-24
Updated: 2021-02-24
Packaged: 2021-03-15 05:15:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,627
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29678976
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jesshelga/pseuds/jesshelga
Summary: Eddie and Bev try to make a clean start post-clown. Hard to do with a scraggly goatee and echoes of the past in their present.Inspired by "A Better Son/Daughter" by Rilo Kiley
Relationships: Eddie Kaspbrak & Beverly Marsh, Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier
Comments: 6
Kudos: 42





	Your ship may be coming in

**Author's Note:**

> CW: (also tagged) references to canonical abuse (parental/domestic/sexual), references to canonical violence

_And your ship may be coming in_

_You're weak, but not giving in_

_And you'll fight it, you'll go out fighting all of them_

\--”A Better Son/Daughter,” Rilo Kiley

Eddie blessedly did not have many memories of the hours after the clown’s giant leg had torn up his shoulder and side. The shock and the blood loss were good friends to him and had seemingly turned the lights out but for one hazy, almost drunken moment: Richie pressed chest to chest with him while he lay on the blacktop, his breath shuddering through Eddie’s skin and into his bones. During one, brief lucid moment, Eddie put his hand on Richie’s forearm and stroked at fine hairs on his arm, thinking fuzzily about the weeds along the shoreline of the quarry.

And then Eddie's mind dredged up a memory of an upsetting picture in his 8th grade science textbook that had snuck up on him as he was doing homework at the kitchen table. His mother, naturally, was around the corner in the living room, close enough to call if she needed proof of life.

The picture was of some kind of sea bird, at least based on the sand, hunched over a set of smaller legs, and the caption of the photo had said something about protective instincts developing to ensure propagation. But Eddie could see it for what it was: a mother bird with hatchlings under its wing, buried in its ample breast, wasn’t protective; it was smothering and full of parasites, dark and frustrating.

Safe but for who?

Fading in and out in the sunlight, Richie curved over him like a living, breathing turtle shell, inhaling and exhaling along with him. The words “It’s not so bad; I get it now;” tumbled out of Eddie, lost in the solid and comforting curve of Richie’s shoulder.

* * *

Richie was his one memory immediately after the clown. Richie was his first memory when he finally swam to a steadier kind of consciousness, though it was warm and beveled by pain medication. Eddie felt Richie before he saw him, a gentle pressure on his face that he could tie to Richie rubbing his thumb along his cheekbone. Richie’s eyes widened behind his glasses and he leaned back and took his hand away.

“You had an eyelash,” he said, flashing a quick thumbs-up type gesture.

Blinking felt like a monumental task. Eddie accomplished it, but a few seconds later, his eyes closed again. It was more comfortable that way as he built up his voice in the rock-heavy realm of his diaphragm. “Where’s my wish, motherfucker?”

There was a silence that stretched out like taffy, winding over and through Eddie until he was able to open his eyes again. Richie was smiling but it was tight and then wobbly, as was his voice when he finally spoke. “I’ll save it for you. You shouldn’t make a wish while you’re on drugs. We learned about that in an afterschool special.”

“ _You’re_ an afterschool special,” Eddie replied as his hand found its way through the rail of the hospital bed. Richie took it and squeezed it so hard that Eddie felt it sing all the way up into his elbow.

* * *

The next time Eddie made it to the surface, it was Bev touching his face. And it was wet.

“Eew.” When he opened his eyes, she was smiling at him.

“It’s either this, or you look like some kind of dirtbag, so shut it.” She punctuated her decree by gently rinsing the razor she’d been brandishing in a metal bowl. The metallic clanging sounded like wind chimes, which he must have said out loud, because Bev chuckled and said, “Wow, sweetie, you’re high as a kite.”

“I think I’ve earned it. Fucking Pennywise. Not enough for him to have a mouth full of fangs, he has to grow hand knives too.” Soon after he stumbled his way through that proclamation, Bev was wiping at his face, carefully navigating the still-healing wound Bowers and his knife had left. Then she began applying post shave balm with dabs she rubbed in with the tips of her fingers, little swirling motions that made him feel dizzy with relief.

“That’s nice,” he murmured, letting his eyes slide shut.

“It should be. It’s from your own stash. You’ve got twice as much skincare shit as me.”

Eddie cracked an eye open. “Don’t make fun of me.”

A fond, silent smirk was Bev’s response. She wiped her hands off on a washcloth, then began fussing with his hair. “I'm glad they washed all the pomade out. Stop suffocating your waves. And don’t put such a severe part in.”

“Hey, I’m not one of your models. You don’t get to tell me what to do.” Eddie thought of his mother plastering his hair to his head for a picture day—or perhaps every day of his life—until he started doing it on his own. So she would stop. One less battle, one thing he could have to himself, even if it wasn’t really his. Bev dancing her fingers through his hair and bossing him around felt better somehow. Like the shaving, it felt like her doing something she figured he wanted to do anyway.

“You could be. I’d hire you today. That narrow little waist? No ungainly hips?” She finished her tousling work and leaned back to admire her work. Her pride made Eddie feel an ounce of what Ben and Bill must be mired in. It was heady to be someone whose existence pleased Bev.

“I have hips.” Then a surge of paranoia zipped through him. “I still have hips, right?” He began tugging at the blankets which seemed vacuum-sealed to his torso.

Bev put a hand on his wrist. “Cool it, Eds. You still have hips.” To put a period on her statement, she pinched him, first the skin on his wrist, then the blankets where his left hip was buried. He reached out his fingers and took her wrist in turn. It felt like he was more tethered to consciousness this way. He brushed a thumb back and forth over the curve leading up to her thumb. 

Looking down, he realized he was rubbing over some mottled bruises. Eddie continued to hold her hand gently but stopped moving his thumb. He met her eyes and hoped he was keeping his expression neutral, or at least that the drugs were dulling his eyes so that he mostly looked high or tired.

  
Whatever Bev saw there didn’t make her angry or defensive or sad, at least not outwardly. She held his gaze, her lips pressed together. “You know, when Ben noticed them for the first time, he cried.” Her tone was a mosaic of affection and disbelief and skepticism.

“Ben is… a very gentle soul.” It was the most earnest thing Eddie said in the past decade. It itched after he said it, somewhere deep in his esophagus where he imagined he’d incubated any gentleness or empathy in his personality for too long, so long that it had spoiled, split open and leaking a scent like bad eggs. The metaphor began to get away from him and he felt a little nauseous.

Something must have changed within his complexion because Bev grabbed a clean bedpan from the floor and settled it in her lap. “Let me know if you need it.” A corner of her mouth twitched. “I won’t tell Ben his kindness made you puke.”

“You better not. He and Mike are the reason I made it all the way out of the well house. That might be enough for him to throw me back.” Eddie wasn’t thinking of Ben and Mike helping him walk (and, at one perilous point, Ben carrying him firefighter-style, over his shoulder as he climbed the ladder); he was instead thinking of Richie folded over him, blood soaking all over his mustard-yellow button-up, breathing deep.

Along with the memory, Eddie began to take cleansing inhales, holding them a moment before exhaling. After three, nausea subsided. He still clung to Bev’s purple and yellow wrist. “I’m okay. It’s passing. Thank you.”

Bev set the bedpan back onto the floor, then slipped out of his grasp, careful not to touch him, and rubbed some hand sanitizer on her hands. She looked at him ruefully. If Richie were here, he’d make the subtext text, saying something about how the bedpan was Eddie’s version of a bruise. He could probably do a solid three minutes of free association from there.

To scatter his thoughts away from Richie, Eddie explored a different line of uncomfortable thought. “You’re not going back to that guy, right?”

“My husband, Tom?” Though it ended with inflection indicating a question, Eddie could see, in Bev’s level gaze and still hands, it was meant as an exercise of strength and will, to show she could say both his name and his title; as ever, even through the fog of opioids, Eddie was impressed and envious. He wished he were able to channel his cocktail of rage and fear into something constructive like feats of emotional strength. “No. I suppose I’ll have to reappear eventually but for now… no. Besides, Richie grabbed a _Chicago Tribune,_ and apparently, Tom went to get some stitches and is now being… questioned about my disappearance.”

Eddie mouthed the word “Disappearance” but did not say it. He supposed this was where Derry’s fucked-up, Bermuda Triangle-like existence paid off. But also… “Stitches?”

Bev smiled. It was tight-lipped, and her eyes sparkled with a feral sort of satisfaction. “I bashed him over the head.”

He found himself smiling in return, mirroring her righteous joy. “Good.” He realized he was not Ben, so he couldn’t realistically offer to beat the shit out of this guy, Tom, on her behalf, so he suggested what he was best at: being an accessory to murder. “Let me know if you want to go and do it again. With a chainsaw. I’ll help clean up.”

She reached out to take his wrist much as he had taken hers moments earlier. “Thanks, Eddie.” Linking their fingers together so that they were holding hands, she squinted at him. After a moment of contemplation, she spoke. “Can I ask you a weird question?”

He squeezed her hand. “Of course.”

“How did it feel… when your mom died?”

If it were anyone else, Eddie would have retreated to the nice, public-facing version of Eddie Kaspbrak, the one he saved for people like Mr. Keene. If it were Mike or Bill or Ben, he might say, “She suffered for too long. It was sad.” Statements that sounded like an answer but weren’t. Were acceptable, polite dodges.

(Eddie couldn’t imagine Richie asking, because he could sense that Richie was still 13 years old in his heart on this one topic. If Richie wasn’t making jokes about his mother’s weight, he would be silently seething and sad about That Summer and all the days that followed, when Sonia’s coldness communicated over and over and over that Richie was not welcome past her doorstep.)

But it was Bev that asked, so Eddie answered honestly. “Fucked up? I guess? I spent so many years with her as an anchor. In my life, in my ear, in my head. And when she was fading, I tried… I tried so hard to take care of her the way I wished she would have taken care of me, you know? Just fucking _doing_ things without scaring her with her own mortality every second of the day. But in my heart, I was resentful and pissed, and… I think she knew that. She would tell me how good I was, but it was like she was congratulating herself in a way. She won. Right up until the end. Keeping me there being good. I don’t know. I don’t know. And then when she was gone, I was so _relieved_. I know it’s terrible and ungrateful but I was. And I guess I didn’t know how to convert that into, like, being a healthy person. So I found a way to recreate it all. In no time at all, it was all happening the way it had for years, only this time with… with Myra. My wife.”

His gaze had dropped at some point, but at the end, as he said Myra’s name, he looked up at Bev. She was looking back, even and steady. No judgment; only understanding. The relief that washed over him surged into his chest, and he heard himself swallow thickly around a lump of emotion that could turn, any minute, into tears. He didn’t think Bev was ready for, or needed, the other part of it, the weird way sex had entered into it all. But he imagined she would not judge that either. And he imagined, without detail, that she knew all too well.

Bev squeezed his hand. “Thanks for telling me. I didn’t really ever know when it happened... when my dad died. My aunt pretended like he’d never existed. And I used to think about it a lot when I was younger. I’d imagine how it happened. I’d wonder, ‘Is today the day that he got in a car accident? Did cirrhosis finally finish him off? Maybe he got caught touching some other girl and someone just fucking murdered him, bashed his brains in.’ I thought about that last one a lot. A _lot_.”

“I’m sorry.” He said it, both for the young Bev they’d been unable to help or protect, and for the grown-up Bev who revisited that time wistfully, perhaps still thinking about some anonymous adult figure wreaking vengeance in a conclusive way she could not. Though she had certainly made a best effort, from what he’d seen in the newspaper back in ‘89.

“Me too. I’m sorry too. For both of us.” She declared it firmly, not allowing room for Eddie’s observation, perhaps evident in his expression, that she definitely had it worse than he did. He sighed through his nose; she squeezed his hand a few times, then changed the subject. “You know who else cried a lot? Someone you wouldn’t expect.”

Eddie felt his eyebrows settle into an authoritative, stern line. “Bev.” He tugged at his hand, but Bev refused to let him go.

“I know genuine expression of emotions aren’t either of your M.O.s but tough shit. You’re all whacked out on morphine so I’m going to tell you. That’s your one out to pretend like I didn’t. But Richie cried. He cried while we were waiting on the ambulance. He cried when you went into surgery. He cried when you came out of surgery. He cried when the doctor said you’d woken up for a few minutes the first time. And I saw _you_ at the Jade. I saw you looking at him. And I know you’re married but… Eddie, given everything you and I just talked about, I get the feeling that’s not a good thing for the rest of your days, y’know?”

Unclenching his jaw, Eddie replied sourly, “It’s not like he wrote me a poem.”

“No, he did his version of it: he annoyed the shit out of you. And when the time came, he knew you. And believed in you.” 

She sighed and then squeezed his hand so hard that he protested with a “Hey! Ouch!”

She smirked. “Don’t be a baby. You have an IV drip that’ll take care of it.” She sat back in her chair, taking her hand with her. “I’m not telling you to marry him. But I am telling you that if you have any kind of dirty naked thoughts about him, now’s a great time to tell him.”

“Oh, _God,_ Bev.”

“Don’t be so Catholic.”

Eddie huffed. “Yeah, now’s a great time when I’m all sewn up like Frankenstein and covered in skin grafts. How sexy, especially to a B-list celebrity who is used to hanging out with beautiful people on movie sets and shit. ‘Hey, Rich, my teenage boner for you carried over but we’ll just have to draw pictures of hard dicks for the next three months because I sure as shit am not going to be able to participate in any kind of actual physical sex.’ I’m sure he’ll be on board right away.” He was surprised, immediately after his rant, how easy it was to admit it to Bev. _Teenage boner._ In hindsight, he maybe would’ve been a little less transparent but he was relieved, nearly giddy to confirm her gentle prodding.

Bev had started laughing at “B-list celebrity” and was guffawing by the time he said “draw pictures.” She covered her mouth to muffle the second wave of snickering. “You should _definitely_ say _exactly_ that. When he’s done laughing, he’ll draw you _the most_ lovingly detailed dick ever rendered by mankind.”

“Don’t you have somewhere to be? Leave me alone. Why don’t you go Eskimo kiss Ben for a fucking hour or look at the sunset together or something?”

“Oh, Eddie, Eddie, Eddie.” She leaned forward, close enough that she was halfway to his face. She flicked her eyes down to his frown, he gave her a curt nod, and she leaned the rest of the way forward and gave him a close-mouthed but firm kiss.

He looked at her, and he knew his fondness was leaking out around his stern expression. “I haven’t brushed my teeth since I got here, so I know my breath reeks. I can’t believe you did that.”

“I drank sewage water when that asshole clown dunked me, so I’ve built up a resistance. I’d kiss you again.”

“Gross. Don’t. I’ll tell Ben.”

“Tell Ben what?” Richie wandered into the room with all the timing of a man who had made countless laugh-track-backed entrances after similar setups. He was carrying two very tall paper cups, one of which he handed to Bev. “Your gas station latte, my queen. I hope you enjoy hazelnut-flavored carcinogens.” This statement was pointedly directed at Eddie with a smile that suggested he was encouraging some kind of health-based rant. Eddie, wishing to disappoint both him and Bev in one turn, stayed quiet.

“I kissed Eddie. We were playing Spin the Bottle while you were gone. It was his suggestion.”

Eddie bit back a laugh. “It was _not_. You came onto _me_. I had to remind her I don’t write poetry or pose for, like, lumberjack calendars.”

“Love this bit you two are doing. The Groundlings could definitely use you and your character work.” Richie’s bored tone belied the way his eyes slid between the two of them, searching for the truth. Bev caught Richie’s eye for a split second, leaned forward and kissed the corner of Eddie’s mouth for a three-count, then stood tall and announced, “I’m going to drink my latte in peace, away from all of you, even the lumberjack. Get some rest, Eds. Thanks for the talk.”

Richie half-blocked the door as Bev attempted an exit. “What, don’t I get some tongue? I got you a coffee.” Bev stopped, shifted her weight into her heels, and punched Richie square in the pectoral before exiting the room.

He rubbed at it, laughing breathily through a wince. “Ow, my tit.” Richie looked at Eddie and slouched over to the chair with his latte; the chemical-thick scent of maple hung heavy in the air.

“Did you take the time to pour Log Cabin syrup into a 16-ounce cup? All your teeth are going to fall out. Not, like, in the future. They’re going to fall out today.”

Richie kicked the hospital bed hard enough to give it a rattling jolt. “Great, I’ll turn them into a charm necklace for you. What did you and Bev talk about that has her macking on you?”

Eddie thought about it all in a jumbled order. He was getting tired again, and the emotional heft of their conversation hit him all at once. As soon as he was a little more stable in mind and body, he needed to leave Myra (shit, had they _called_ Myra? He should maybe ask about that too). He needed to start therapy, if not to talk about the fucking clown, then about all the shit he’d said to Bev about his mother’s death.

“I asked her to help me shave.” It wasn’t fully a lie, not in Eddie’s estimation.

“Yeah, you look good. You were starting to look like my raggedy-ass dealer back in LA, the one who sets me up with ‘shrooms and molly.”

Instead of asking "What is molly," Eddie groused, “Shut up. Drink your corn syrup.” Eddie thought about the day before (or maybe it had been three days or four; he’d lost track of linear time) when Richie had squeezed his hand; Eddie wanted that again. “Bev’s husband is an asshole, huh?”

Richie took a dramatically amplified sip of his coffee and smacked his lips. “Yup, sure is.” He set the coffee down, leaned forward. “Is that what you two talked about?”

Eddie sighed. “A little.” Then, using the last bit of strength he had for the foreseeable future, he sat up a little straighter and said, “Let me try your coffee.”

Richie smiled and popped the lid off the cup. “It’s still a little hot.”

“Yeah, yeah.” Richie held it to Eddie’s lips. After a sip, Eddie sunk back into his pillows. “Yuck.” He watched as Richie put the lid back on and took another soda-commercial-style oh-how-refreshing drink. “Rich?”

“Yeah, buddy?”

“Thanks for taking care of me.” Eddie closed his eyes and held out his hand. Eventually, he felt Richie’s mammoth paw wrap around it and squeeze.

Before sleep overtook him, he heard Richie murmur, “Yeah, anytime. Anytime, Eds.”

**Author's Note:**

> [I wish we were still in the heydey of fanvids.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B0sy7y54XAE) Someone could make a real humdinger from 2017/2019 clips of Bev and Eddie


End file.
